Going All-In
Marketing advice
Arlene is always looking for different avenues to stimulate the country’s entrepreneurial community, and her latest book, All-In, which hit the shelves of bookstores this past December, is no exception. “It’s all about the entrepreneurial lifestyle,” she explains. “It’s about the truth of being an entrepreneur, what it really means. I’ve interviewed about 30 different entrepreneurs around the country; heard their stories of successes and failures, and how personal and professional lives intersect when you’re an entrepreneur.” All-In takes a different approach than her first book, Persuasion, which came out in 2011, but she enjoys the process and the introspection it affords. “Persuasion was a very personal book, so I found it almost cathartic to be able to talk and feel okay about putting yourself out there. It’s a scary thing, but I found it very helpful to me to write. It opened worlds for me that I hadn’t thought about, because it makes you think about your life differently. You have to think about the lessons that you’ve learned. It requires a discipline that you normally don’t apply to yourself. “So the second book where I was doing a lot of interviewing of entrepreneurs, it was the same thing. It makes you ask questions you probably wouldn’t ask yourself normally. There’s an inward thinking process about being involved in writing a book that’s very unique. And it was very fulfilling for me.”
If Arlene only had one piece of advice to offer small business owners for marketing their businesses, it is to dare to be different. “When you’re marketing a service you have to be able to differentiate in some way, and that becomes hard,” she explains. “I think it is about making sure your team understands the value set that you have, as it relates to delivering your service. A lot of mistakes are made in the service business because you have the entrepreneur that’s keenly engaged in doing the best work they can. But if that standard isn’t understood by all your team and held up as the standard of excellence, what happens is your services start to slip and you start to lose customers. So it’s really important when you’re in the service business that you have a standard of excellence that everybody understands and that you start to get known for.” Arlene also reminds small business owners of the perils of playing the price game. “If you want to get into the price game you’ll end up probably playing a tough game, ‘cause anyone can drive you to the bottom – but you’ve got to play a game where people feel there is value for what they’re getting, and value isn’t always price. Value is very rarely price. It’s a combination of servicing, and skill, and quality, and price is a factor, but it’s not the only factor.”
Arlene’s enterprises Through Arlene Dickinson Enterprises, Dickinson is helping entrepreneurs commercialize their ideas and take them to market. One of her latest partnerships was with Kinetex, a marketing and tech sales consulting firm, to form the AK Technology Group, an enterprise designed to provide expert counselling to start-up technology companies for business planning, product design, marketing, manufacturing, sales and distribution. “Through Arlene Dickinson Enterprises I’ve developed a kind of ecosystem of support to help commercialize products across a variety of different areas, technology being one of them,” she says. “There’s a whole bunch of things that I’m working on related to promoting the entrepreneurial economy.”
A meeting place for mechanical minds? Arlene encourages entrepreneurs within Canada’s mechanical sector to join YouInc.com to learn from the endeavors of others. “They should join the site because there is a lot of information there that is just practical, storytellingtype information, entrepreneur to entrepreneur, talking about failures and successes, and the roads travelled – tales from the battlefield of being an entrepreneur,” she says. “There’s also a community where you can talk to other entrepreneurs – share and learn lessons from each other.” There is also a section on the website where people who are interested in obtaining assistance for the commercializing of their ideas, or are looking for investors, can submit their ideas.
Loo love on Dragons’ Den The venture capitalists of CBC’s Dragons’ Den have listened to a countless number of pitches over the show’s eight seasons, but the mechanical sector – more specifically, the plumbing sector – has offered more than its fair share of pitches to the Dragons over the years. “We get so many pitches on toilets it’s not funny. There is clearly a very personal relationship between a man and his toilet,” Arlene says while laughing. “Probably proportionally, we’ve had more HVAC- or plumbing-related pitches than anything. Either they’re toilets or heating, or they’re showers, or something to do with kitchen sinks. So we get a lot in that area, and some of them are insanely crazy, like portable bidets… there is an obsession with that area.”
Navy and is the recipient of honorary degrees from sity and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
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